These materials include 25-year records of lake levels in 7 lakes in Northern Wisconsin, Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and precipitation; graphs illustrating changes in lake levels over time; photographs of drought conditions in these lakes; supporting text and a list of related scientific articles.

Materials (see Associated files) could be used to illustrate two different ecological concepts/processes.
1) These data and graphics provide an example of the effects of a changing climate on aquatic ecosystems. The declines in lake levels observed in some lakes during drought has been dramatic, and have a range of ecological effects, some examples of which are described above.

2) The data set provides an example of a central tenet of landscape ecology: that the spatial position of an ecosystem within the surrounding landscape affects the properties of the ecosystem- in this case, a lake’s response to changing climate.